“Maybe so. But why would you deny him the world on the off chance that he will be one of those people?”
“I understand that the simple life doesn’t appeal to you,” she threw at him, the cold wind tossing her hair about her. She shoved it back and held it off her forehead as she glared at him. “But that speaks more to your snobbery than any lack in it.”
Pascal studied her, as she stood there, hair in a mess and clearly cold, with her body between him and her cottage.
As if she could fend him off if he wanted to walk in that door and handle this his way. Right now.
The urge to do exactly that was like a physical pain inside him.
He had dreamed of his little boy’s face. He had imagined it.
He supposed this waslonging,this rough-edged ache that pulsed in him and left him feeling empty.
Behind her the cottage looked warm and cozy. He could see the buttery light from within, and even though it was winter, he could see the remains of summer flowers and the planting that must take place in spring. As if this was a house well loved. Itlookedhappy.
Pascal couldn’t bear to think about how easily he could have gone home after his date in Rome, slept, then resumed his life. He might never have come here again. He might never have known.
And he didn’t know what to call the thing that moved in him then, all teeth and claws andwhat-ifs.
Cecilia stood there before him, her cheeks flushed from the chill and her arms folded across her chest as if to ward off the plummeting temperatures. As if he was the enemy when she was the one who had done this. She was the one who had hidden away here with this secret she’d had no intention of sharing with him.
“I told you I was staying here,” he growled at her. “Did you think I would change my mind?”
“Maybe I hoped you would,” she replied.
With a bitter flash of honesty that he could have done without.
It was not until he had taken his leave of her—to stomp his spleen into the frozen fields as he tramped around the valley—that he understood why he couldn’t quite bring himself to view her as evil. The way he thought he should. On the contrary, something about the way she’d stood up to him—bodily—made his chest ache, and it wasn’t until he was back in his stark, monastic chamber that he understood why.
He would have given anything, or everything if asked, to see his mother stand up for him. Even once.
But Marissa Del Guardia had stood for nothing. Not for herself, and certainly not for the child she’d never wanted who had ruined her happiness—something she had no qualm telling him directly. His father had swept in and swept her off her feet as if she was a flower to pick from a garden instead of a waitress in a restaurant he frequented. He’d used her as he liked, then discarded her when she’d fallen pregnant. He had never looked back.
And Marissa’s response had been desolation, followed by sleeping pills, and whatever she could find to take the edge off during the day.
Pascal couldn’t imagine any circumstance in which she would ever have stirred herself to defend him. He was only surprised she’d actually carried him to term.
He couldn’t deny that there was a part of him that liked the fact that his child’s mother was prepared to fight off any adversary. Even if that adversary was him.
But by the time a week had dragged by with him marooned in an empty room with only his memories for company and work to dull that noise, Pascal was beginning to lose his famous cool.
It had been educational, to say the least, to discover how much of his business he could handle from afar. It suggested that it wouldn’t do him any harm to relax his grip as he had not done since he started. He would need to consider what that meant.
But there was only so much “rusticating” a man could take in the presence of nuns who treated him like an naughty boy, the long shadow of what he’d done here and how he’d left, and the woman who appeared to think she could wait him out and, in effect, steal his child from him all over again.
Pascal wasn’t here to address his workaholic tendencies. He was here for his son.
And he’d been ignored as long as he was prepared to take.
So it was almost lowering, really, when he stormed from his room out into the clinic’s lobby to find Cecilia waiting for him.
She stood wrapped in a long, camel-colored coat that made her hair gleam and her violet eyes seem fairly purple. She stared at him for a long, solemn moment as if working up to what she meant to say.
“I’ve been here a week,” Pascal pointed out, caring not at all if every person in the clinic beyond was watching and could hear him. “I have sat in my cell and performed my penance. What more can you possibly want from me?”
“That’s a dangerous question.”
“Shall I beg?” he asked, his voice soft with the menace building in him. They were alone in the foyer for the moment, though he wouldn’t have cared if the entire order was lined up around them, singing hymns of praise. “Plead? Or perhaps I should argue my case with a kiss, which seems to be the only time you forget to view me as your enemy? Tell me, which will work?I want to see my son.”